Western Civilization

office of sheriff. William took a census and more fully developed the system of taxation and royal courts begun by the Anglo-Sax ...

Becket: “Who will free me of this priest?” he screamed. Four knights took the challenge, went to Canterbury, and murdered the ar ...

Magna Carta After King John’s dismal failure to reconquer Normandy from the French king, some of the English barons rebelled aga ...

of the later Crusades, but both were failures, and he met his death during an invasion of North Africa. PHILIP IV AND THE ESTATE ...

Christian Reconquest: The Spanish Kingdoms Much of Spain had been part of the Islamic world since the eighth century, and Muslim ...

The Lands of the Holy Roman Empire: Germany and Italy In the tenth century, the powerful dukes of Saxony became kings of the lan ...

into his empire. The cities of northern Italy, which had become used to their freedom, were also not willing to be Frederick’s s ...

landowning class. To the south, in eastern Europe, Hungary, which had been a Christian state since 1000, remained relatively sta ...

of China northward to Khanbaliq (khahn-bah-LEEK) (“city of the Khan”), which would later be known by the Chinese name Beijing (b ...

The Recovery and Reform of the Catholic Church Q FOCUSQUESTION: What was at issue in the Investiture Controversy, and what effec ...

intention of obeying a decree that challenged the very heart of his administration. The struggle between Henry IV and Gregory VI ...

twelfth-century Europe. Whereas a Benedictine monk often spent hours in prayer to honor God, the Cister- cian ideal had a differ ...

to provide a more personal religious experience. Like their founder, Saint Francis of Assisi (1182–1226), they lived among the p ...

including praying for themselves and others, copying manuscripts, maintaining libraries and schools, acting as missionaries to t ...

Benedict noted, “All who arrive as guests are to be wel- comed like Christ.” Monks and nuns also took care of the sick, planting ...

of the abbey’s relics by saying, “There is kept there a thing more precious than gold,... the right arm of St. Oswald.... This w ...

Rhineland. Bands of Christians set upon Jews in Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Cologne. In the thirteenth century, in the supercharge ...

Treatment of the Jews The development of new religious sensibilities in the High Middle Ages also had a negative side—the turnin ...

ISLAM AND THE SELJUK TURKS By the mid-tenth century the Islamic empire led by the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad was in the proces ...

military arms and religious fervor. A self-appointed leader, Peter the Hermit, who preached of his visions of the Holy City of J ...